For your unfailing love is higher than the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds. Psalm 108: 4

Perspective

            Last month, a friend and I visited the Krannert Art Museum on the University of Illinois campus.  The sprawling building is filled with pottery, textiles, sculpture, paintings and other media, some of the pieces by well-known artists like Winslow Homer.  It was to Homer's painting, Cernay la Ville, painted outdoors in the French countryside in 1867, that I was most drawn.  The sky, summer blue and cumulous, covered the top two-thirds of the small canvas.  I thought, wow, this guy really liked the sky!  Below all that sky the farmhouse and barns look small, toy-like in comparison. We moved on through the museum, but that painting, all its outdoor light and sky, stayed with me.  It wasn't until I was driving home that evening that I realized Homer had it right.  Out across the mostly flat, Midwestern landscape I've been looking at all my life, there was the sky, at least two-thirds of the view, the distant farmhouses and barns, tiny and toy-like along the horizon.  How is it, I wondered, that I've been looking at this all these years and never noticed this?  How many other ways have I been blind?

            There is so much more I want to tell you, but you can't bear it now (John 16:12), Jesus said to his disciples.  He had been telling them that he was going away soon, but would return. Other exciting things were going to happen.  The Spirit of truth would come and guide them into all truth.  What?  They were befuddled.  I would have been, too.

            The disciples weren't the clueless dolts we sometimes imagine them to be.  This was all new to them.  The whole of truth isn't something we can take in all at once.  Sometimes, like me with that sky, it takes years for us to see what's been right before our eyes our whole lives. Why? Maybe it's because we haven't been paying attention. That happens, yes. Or maybe it's because we can't bear it yet and God is being merciful by giving us time to reach a place where we can. The Spirit is sent to guide us into all truth, step by step. Truth is like that sky--blue and cumulous and stretching high above us.  Who can ever say they know it all?  Or know its limits?  No one but its Author.

            Thomas Merton writes, "We do not want to be beginners.  But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life!" 

How many other ways have I been blind?  It will take a lifetime of prayer and reading and walking in faith to find out, and even then, I won't know it all because I'm not God.  Only God is God.  I find great comfort in that.

Daye Phillippo

June 2015